Day 29

5.03: The slip from the pedestal and dent sustained to the halo make it much harder ever to be virtuous again. I feel this morning like a shamed public figure trying to rehabilitate himself: Peter Mandleson perhaps or Mark Sanford.

Let’s keep things in perspective: it’s a Mandleson, or at worst Sanford, level of humiliation: I’m not Stephen Milligan yet. But when this blog does get to the metaphorical point of stocking-clad, orange-gobbed autoerotic asphyxiation, I hope someone will come round and metaphorically tidy up a bit before calling the metaphorical police.

The good news though is that public humiliation works. I am living self-loathing early-rising proof of this. No one tell the US Government.

The bad news is, this morning, it hurts like hell. There’s a sand-dwelling creature trying to crawl from my throat, and two clockwork dockers brawling in my head. Legs apparently stolen in the night; sneakily replaced with a couple of cabers.

5.43: “Spiritual abuse cuts to the bowel of the soul,” the Quaker thinker Alastair McIntosh just said on Radio 4’s Prayer for the Day. Never let it be said that religion doesn’t have an ear for poetry. I like the idea that, if I have a soul, it’s at least one with a working bowel, steadily excreting fibrous spiritual waste. Perhaps that’s where Tom Cruise came from, dragged into existence through the soul-colon of L Ron Hubbard.

6.56: I’m not sure that quite amounts to coming back strong, but it was coming back nonetheless. This is how disgrace works. If you take David Beckham’s international career as a timeline for me writing a novel, then at the moment I’ve had the red card against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup. England are down and out, but I’m back to the training ground to work on my freekicks. They’ll come in handy in a couple of years’ time.